Improve Boot Camp Gaming Performance with an External SSD

19 August 2016

Last year, I was playing Battlefield 4 on my 2013 iMac through Boot Camp. My iMac has a 3TB Fusion Drive which meant that the Windows partition (and Battlefield) were installed on the hard drive portion of the disk, rather than the flash storage. This precipitated in a situation where my eldest nephew wanted to see Battlefield 4 and had to wait over three minutes for a multiplayer level to load.

Short of buying a newer iMac with a flash drive, I’ve instead bought an external USB3 Samsung T3 250GB SSD. After connecting the drive to the iMac and formatting it, I uninstalled Battlefield 4 and reinstalled it on the SSD.

I expected a minor performance improvement. What I actually got was fairly incredible: loading time decreased from over three minutes to 19 seconds. This is more than acceptable and a much more cost-effective option than buying a new iMac!